Preventive Archaeology

Preventive Archaeology presents a series of journeys to a variety of places where the collective memory can be questioned. Rather than investigations into the past, the projects by Oriol Vilanova, Lúa Coderch, Lola Lasurt and Antonio Gagliano trace a series of journeys through the superficial layers of memory, through the various forms that the exercise of recounting history takes at the present moment.

Under investigation here are the commemorations, monuments, archives, museums, reproductions and other formations through which history is set up, told and exposed to the public sphere. To describe memory from the epidermis brings us close to the topographic work that precedes all archaeological excavations and that, in this case, helps to map the legacies that have survived until now and structure our relation to the past.

In parallel, at Espai 14-15, located in Bellvitge, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the collective LaFundició has set up a space for debate with the agents and institutions behind two current commemorations: the 1714 Tercentenary and Bellvitge50. Articulated from contrasting historiographic fields, Preventive Archaeology is a platform aiming to widen the collaborations and the influence of this essay on alternatives to the collective memory.

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Exhibitions

Oriol Vilanova: To represent a country free of conflicts. To construct official scenes of popular culture. Folkloric elements that refer to an ancestral past or to modernity. In some attributes, ideologies collide.

To demolish a concrete building by hitting it with a mallet. To forge the grandeur of the copy. A tourist is an interpreter in a constant state of suspicion, someone looking for signs that will certify his experience as real. The story must be reliable.

To rename the squares. To move monuments. To turn people who do not practise sport into Olympic champions. History changes when institutions allow it. The appearance of objects from the past in the public space is subject to bureaucracy.